Adobe.com have finally thrown away the clothes they bought a couple or so years back with the acquisition of Macromedia.
After the purchase of lovely Macromedia by Adobe, I for one was sad. Lots of silly reasons, like rooting for the little guy and also from a simple business sense, less competition amongst these guys is probably going to reduce benefits to me, the user of their products.
But Adobe seem to have meant it when they started to do some pretty work re-positioning themselves as a bit more edgy, cool. From the packaging to the promotion of CS3, they have produced some work that is eye catching and more rather than less original, making me believe there is a creative soul in the large corp’.
But since the purchase of Macromedia GoogleLookupIfYouLike years ago, one large pimple on the new face of street cred’ and cool design for me was Adobe’s wholesale re-use of the Macromedia website design. It was (nearly), Macromedia.com with the word ‘Macromedia’ crossed out in crayon and ‘Adobe’ written in.
Also, and most importantly for me, I think (and if I am doing Macromdeia a disservice here by being entirely wrong then I apologise) the Macromedia site was not built to, or close to web standards. So it was with delight that I saw the new Adobe site. Not only a very nice design but also, a quick Shit+Cmd+S on the keyboard (if you have Firefox+Web developer add-on) to turn off CSS styling and there, underneath a lot of lovely CSS is an equally lovely set of clear, simple, lists — highly navigable and readable to all, including those with screen-readers. I take my hat off to Adobe. Excellent. Some might say “about time” but that’s up to them, to me it’s just good news, seeing an important bastion of design (and more) software treating the Web correctly.
Back to the design, you may or may not like the HOVER triggered Ajax / JavaScript movements, I always find it a little annoying when stuff moves on hover, a bit like an Indiana Jones film where you cross the beam of light and get a surprise (I like the film, but Indie does not like getting skewered and although my fate, with HOVER, is not so painful, it’s still a surprise, and is surprise in a nav’ what one should aim for? I think not. The same design with a click–to–trigger and a visual cue to tell me to click would have been better. But that and other small likes or dislikes by me or you is not the big point. The big point is that for this to be the level of focus for criticism, means so much else is now right with Adobe.com. And that’s gotta be a good thing.